[TriLUG] remote power monitoring

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Mon, 16 Jan 2023, bradford powell wrote:

> If you just have one or a few devices to monitor that are less than 15A

yes

> and are willing to have a slightly-more work involved (which may be a 
> plus or minus...) then you might want to look into devices that are 
> supported by tasmota or espurna.

tasmota is neat, but I'd rather something plug and play.

> For instance, the sonoff S31 has a wifi version that uses an esp8266
> internally for the wifi communication. While I think the default firmware
> communicates with one or more cloud services (boo!), there are solder
> points for the UART/serial on the board (hooray!), so you can open it up
> (WITHOUT 110V POWER CONNECTED!), connect a usb-to-TTL serial adapter, and
> replace the firmware with something like tasmota or espurna that will allow
> you more control over where your data goes. Then you could just log the
> data via something that sends a periodic "curl" to an address on the
> device, or send messages or MQTT, or integrate with homeassistant...
>
> https://tasmota.github.io/docs/devices/Sonoff-S31/ links to a video showing
> the firmware replacement process. Once you do this initially, updating (or
> switching from tasmota to espurna) can typically be done over-the-air, so
> you wouldn't have to keep opening the device.
>
> If you were to go the tasmota-wifi route, be careful that there is an "S31
> Lite" that doesn't have power monitoring, and a zigbee version of the same,
> so you'd have to make sure to get the right one. And the newer S40 uses a
> different non-esp8266 chip so it's not supported by tasmota or espurna.
>
> Or you could take the zigbee route, for which there are a number of similar
> devices-- then if you had a non-cloud-linked zigbee hub you should be able
> to keep everything local and avoid the opening-a-device part of things. I
> don't have experience with zigbee to be able to comment on how they would
> compare.


thanks for the overview

Joe

--
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
Don't upgrade a working machine - it won't work any
better - it could work worse; it may not work at all.
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!